Zotac ZBOX nano AD10 + XBMCbuntu + tweaks = awesome media center

I finally had enough of running XBMC on the Apple TV, it wasn’t the fastest box on the planet and the remote is not the easiest of things to use to navigate around. The last update was the proverbial straw. In order to watch Netflix in the UK I needed to update my ATV2 to a IOS 5.x version which was all cool, except that at the time there was only a tethered jailbreak. This was not such a problem until the other day when the ATV2 decided to have a fit and freeze, which needed a restart, which needed a tethered boot, which I couldn’t get going for love nor money. Signs seem to indicate a dodgy USB cable, so at some point I’ll try and sort it out, but the most obvious solution seemed to be to move to an actual computer, rather than a walled garden with a hole punched in it.

I have a Raspberry Pi arriving in the next week or so, and I briefly considered using that to run XBMC, but that seems like a waste when there are far more interesting ideas floating around in my head for it!

After some searching around for a bit I stumbled upon the Zotac ZBOX nano AD10 which seemed to offer exactly what I wanted;

1080 HD

HD Audio

Gigabit LAN

Small form factor

The price wasn’t too bad, £189.99 – and although it doesn’t come with a HDD or RAM., it does come with a MCE remote control, USB IR extender and a VESA mount kit (with screws!) for attaching to the back of the TV.

I chucked in an old 2.5″ 160GB HDD, and 1GB or RAM and so far it seems to be screaming along! Looking at the memory usage whilst playing a 720p movie (I don’t have any 1080 to try just yet – ATV2 wouldn’t play them) it seemed to max out at ~ 720mb mark, so 1GB will probably be plenty to power it. (The box itself supports up to 4GB, so I think a new 2GB chip would be more than enough to keep it going)

For the OS I went with XBMCbuntu, it just makes sense when all the box will be used for is XBMC, why bother installing all the other crap that is not needed? The ZBOX can be booted from either an external DVD or bootable USB drive, just jump into the BIOS (hit del on boot – incidentally one of the most colourful BIOS I’ve seen!) and set up the boot order – I had to plug/unplug the USB whilst in here to get it to recognise.

So far everything has worked out of the box, apart from a couple of little bits that Im still investigating:

HD Audio [solved] I had to change the pass-though device to be HDMI (ALSA) instead of whatever it was set to. I’m not sure if this is giving me proper HD sound, but the surround sound seems to work fine. Maybe I’ll look into this a bit more if I ever get a surround sound system that supports 8-channel LPCM output

Not all remote buttons work[solved] Some of the buttons on the remote don’t work, namely the Sleep, Wake, Teletext, Program, Windows Button, Red, Blue, Green or Yellow buttons. This can be fixed by using lirc to control the remote, rather than the kernel – as it does OOTB. You can get a few more buttons working (Sleep,Wake,Program) by running

> sudo dpkg-reconfigure lirc

and choosing Linux input layer (/dev/input/eventX) for receiver and none for transceiver. To get all the buttons working however, you can follow the instructions in my other post on Configuring the Zotac ZBOX Remote Control

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